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Robert Browning

Selected Poems

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Robert Browning

By: Robert Browning
Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
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About this listen

 Given Browning's intensely romantic love affair with Elizabeth Barrett, it is characteristic that he should view love as the key to the meaning of life and life's animating force. This view of life is projected throughout his poetry. Included in this collection are "Johannes Agricola in Meditation," "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "A Toccata of Galuppi's," "The Lost Leader," "The Statue and the Bust," "How it Strikes a Contemporary," "The Patriot," "Memorabilia," "James Lee's Wife," "Confessions," "Youth and Art," "A Likeness," "Mr. Sludge," "The Medium," "House," "St. Martin's Summer," "The Names," "Beatrice Signorini," "Spring Song," and others.(P)1992 by Blackstone Audiobooks Adventure Classics European Genetic Engineering Literary History & Criticism Poetry Science Fiction World Literature
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I love Robert Browning's poetry, particularly his long monologues, and read out loud by someone who has a feel for the rhythm and his ideas, you appreciate Browning's true greatness. Unfortunately, Frederick Davidson does not cut it as a narrator for me. He simply lacks the subtlety to bring what the poems are about. Generally I like him as a narrator - his Vanity Fair is brilliant for example - but not this time.

The best reader of Browning is James Mason. Audible do a selection - alas all to brief - but if I were you, I would spend my money on Mason reading only a few poems rather than this longer volume - which, to be fair, is quite a good selection if you can bear the narration. Do listen to the sample first to make up your own mind.

good value but off-putting narration

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This recording is superb value. So many of the poetry selections on CD are disappointingly brief. This collection includes many of Browning's most characteristic and brilliant works. Try reading some of them aloud yourself and you will appreciate how incredibly difficult they are to voice, with their complex syntax, frequent ironic interpolations and sheer density of meaning.

I have downloaded several readings by Frederick Davidson and have sometimes found his voice a bit arch and over-posh to listen to for long. However, Browning is definitely his territory: he communicates superbly the high-intellectual, urbane personality of the poet. Download this to remind yourself or discover that there is a lot more to Victorian verse than languishing neurasthenic ladies, nonsense doggerel and mawkish pieties.

The masculine poetic

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I heard RB'S voice on a wax cylinder recording, he was celebrating the new 'recording invention' with a high voice like the narrator of this collection, but his poetry lends to a more sombre and powerful narration unlike this recording. There is not worthy weight applied to the sound of his words here in my opinion.

I imagine RB'S voice to be slower and deeper

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